Destiny's big problem is that it's design doc probably reads like "what if we bolted Halo's FPS to a vanilla WoW-like theme part MMO and made lots of money?" This would be a minor variation on the "What if we made a WoW?" thing that was circulating through the games industry a while back. I had thought the last gasp of this idea was ESO, but further reflection suggests it's actually Destiny.

I think Bungie underestimated the amount of content this really required, probably suffered some internal and external political (corporate politics, not federal politics) pressures that made a dysfunctional hash of the story content, and attempted to streamline a progression model that is practically death to a meaningful endgame experience (in this, I think they were successful, but it exaggerates the problems that already went with this design). I'm not sure to what degree the loot and progression system are aimed at extending the paltry content offering vs. being a result of Bungie misunderstanding the sort of game they'd built. It doesn't really matter.

There's some rumors spinning around their forum at the moment that the next expansion will break progression, again, in a way that will favor the raiders over regular PvE shlubs. That's probably good news for me: it'll be a good excuse to give up on this train wreck, if I haven't, already.
| [ 0 trackbacks ]
| permalink

Happy Groundhog Day

2015.02.01 17:27 - Meatspace Stupidity, Site/Meta

The latter half of last year was long and often both bleak and unpleasant.